Still way better than that other guy
by digby
This chart is pretty hilarious when you consider how much airtime has been given recently to Dick Cheney and the Neocon Retread Rehab Tour:
Again, why is anyone listening to them? Ever?
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Mississippi learning
by digby
I have to admit that I can’t help chuckling at this idiotic Mississippi Senate race. Here’s the latest:
Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s political machine paid to turn out the black vote for Republican Sen. Thad Cochran’s re-election bid, according to campaign finance reports. His vanquished rival insisted that was improper and said Wednesday that a legal challenge to the loss remained likely in the next 10 days.
Barbour, a political giant in his state and a favorite of national donors, backed Mississippi Conservatives and his nephew Henry Barbour was a top official there. Mississippi Conservatives sent almost $145,000 to All Citizens for Mississippi, a late-to-arrive group that urged black voters to turn out for the June 24 runoff between Cochran and tea party favorite state Sen. Chris McDaniel.
The Barbour-led group was the sole source of money for the outreach efforts toward black and Democratic voters. The group spent $111,000 in the final weeks of the campaign to highlight Cochran’s support for historically black colleges and for Hurricane Katrina recovery dollars.
McDaniel and his allies bitterly complain that Democrats helped put Cochran over the top in a state where Democrat is often synonymous with black. McDaniel himself has refused to explicitly reference race, but his advisers said that Cochran and his allies resorted to “race baiting” to win.
Imagine that. Republicans accusing each other of race baiting.
Now it is true that Haley Barbour’s deadpan response is enough to make wingnuts’ heads explode (and liberals laugh out loud)
“What we were looking for were Cochran supporters who didn’t vote,” said Brian Perry, the chief at the pro-Cochran super PAC. “When you go back and look at his 2008 general election, he had a lot of support in the black community. These are people who voted for him before and more-than-likely would be voting for him in the general. And so it makes sense to ask them to vote for him in the primary, as well.”
Yeah, right. Everybody knew what they were doing — the Republican establishment and the African Americans who participated. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
It’s not as though it’s unprecedented for members of the opposing party to make mischief in a primary. And it’s common for the political establishment in both parties to muck around in primaries to benefit incumbents. Certainly, it comes as no surprise to Democrats when the DC Dems try to attract conservative Republicans no make sure a progressive doesn’t beat one of their New Dem/Blue Dog faves. It happens every cycle. I feel the Tea Party’s pain in that regard.
The only thing that’s different here is that Republicans appealed to African Americans, which is apparently such a slap in the face to the Tea Party they just can’t get past it. And I think we know why that might be. The good news is that about half of white Mississippi isn’t having the usual racist fit, so there actually is some progress.
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No good deed goes unpunished
by digby
My piece for Salon today is about the sad fact that the Democrats don’t quite grasp the importance of making sure the people understand they are responsible for delivering something of benefit to them. I talk about how Republicans do this very well and then highlight the unfortunate story of Democratic Senators having to run from their vote for Obamacare even though the people of their state are quite happy with it. Why? Because they don’t realize that the program they’re involved in is Obamacare — because those implementing the program consciously distanced themselves from it.
Once again the Democrats, afraid of being associated with something unpopular, distanced themselves from their own accomplishments rather than seeing the long-term advantage in being the party that brought people “freedom plus groceries.” In this case that would be the liberty afforded to every individual when they are able to move to change jobs, start a business or otherwise operate as free individuals without fear of losing their health insurance — and “groceries” meaning a government that delivers a bit of financial security in an increasingly unstable economic environment.
But no Democratic good deed will go unpunished by Republicans if the Democrats fail to make people aware that they are responsible for it.
How conveeeenient
by digby
Just don’t say he’s “suggesting anything” because he insists he isn’t:
LIMBAUGH: It’s a Malaysian Airlines jet and can you — I’ve got the British Open on the top menu, monitor, I haven’t had CNN on all day, what do you bet they have broomed everything and are covering wall-to-wall the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down by a missile? This is, I mean, you talk about — I don’t want to appear to be callous here, folks, but you talk about an opportunity to abandon the bad Obama news at the border, and no, I’m not suggesting anything other than how the media operates.
Limbaugh not appearing callous is impossible.
But certainly, it’s completely unreasonable for the media to focus on a civilian airliner being shot down in Ukraine by who knows who rather than relentlessly demagogueing the alleged threat to the nation from some poor kids at the border. Seriously, this news media is just irresponsible.
By the way, the last I looked, Fox was covering the airliner story. But I’m sure they’ll get back to demonizing children as soon as they can.
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QOTD: fringe benefits
by digby
“You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old,” Snowden said. “They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position. But they’re extremely attractive.
“So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and show their co-worker. The co-worker says: ‘Hey that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way.’ And then Bill sends it to George and George sends it to Tom. And sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people. It’s never reported. Nobody ever knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communications stream from the intended recipient and given to the government without any specific authorization without any specific need is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in a government database?”
Then Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief asked: “You saw instances of that happening?”
“Yeah,” Snowden responded.
“Numerous?”
“It’s routine enough, depending on the company that you keep, it could be more or less frequent. These are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.”
Why wouldn’t it happen? Remember this?
Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans
U.S. Officers’ “Phone Sex” Intercepted; Senate Demanding AnswersBy BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER
Oct. 9, 2008—Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations “extremely disturbing” and said the committee has begun its own examination.
“We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration,” Rockefeller said Thursday. “The Committee will take whatever action is necessary.”
“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”
She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and “collected on” as they called their offices or homes in the United States.
Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.
“Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another,” said Faulk.
The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other’s allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.
“There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect,” said President Bush at a news conference this past February.
But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which could not be independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much respect is accorded those Americans whose conversations are intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism.
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.
“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.
Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall’s “smoke pit,” but ended up feeling badly about his actions.
“I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me,” he said.
In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.
“It’s not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it,” Gen. Hayden testified.
He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), “Are you just doing this because you just want to pry into people’s lives?”
“No, sir,” General Hayden replied.
Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said “all employees of the US government” should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and “information assurance.”
“They certainly didn’t consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game,” said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country’s warrantless surveillance program.
“This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law,” Turley said.
NSA awarded Adrienne Kinne a NSA Joint Service Achievement Medal in 2003 at the same time she says she was listening to hundreds of private conversations between Americans, including many from the International Red Cross and Doctors without Borders.
“We knew they were working for these aid organizations,” Kinne told ABC News. “They were identified in our systems as ‘belongs to the International Red Cross’ and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them,” she told ABC News.
A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, Michael Goldfarb, said: “The abuse of humanitarian action through intelligence gathering for military or political objectives, threatens the ability to assist populations and undermines the safety of humanitarian aid workers.”
Both Kinne and Faulk said their military commanders rebuffed questions about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking to Americans.
“It was just always, that , you know, your job is not to question. Your job is to collect and pass on the information,” Kinne said.
Some times, Kinne and Faulk said, the intercepts helped identify possible terror planning in Iraq and saved American lives.
“IED’s were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time,” Faulk said.
NSA job evaluation forms show he regularly received high marks for job performance. Faulk left his job as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh to join the Navy after 9/11.
Kinne says the success stories underscored for her the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack.
“By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it’s almost like they’re making the haystack bigger and it’s harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody,” she said. “You’re actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.”
Both former intercept operators came forward at first to speak with investigative journalist Jim Bamford for a book on the NSA, “The Shadow Factory,” to be published next week.
“It’s extremely rare,” said Bamford, who has written two previous books on the NSA, including the landmark “Puzzle Palace” which first revealed the existence of the super secret spy agency.
“Both of them felt that what they were doing was illegal and improper, and immoral, and it shouldn’t be done, and that’s what forces whistleblowers.”
A spokesman for General Hayden, Mark Mansfield, said: “At NSA, the law was followed assiduously. The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face.”
The director of the NSA, Lt. General Keith B. Alexander, declined to directly answer any of the allegations made by the whistleblowers.
In a written statement, Gen. Alexander said: “We have been entrusted to protect and defend the nation with integrity, accountability, and respect for the law. As Americans, we take this obligation seriously. Our employees work tirelessly for the good of the nation, and serve this country proudly.”
Note that this story is from 2008, long before the Snowden revelations. It’s a matter of human nature. Just look at the TSA scanner debacle.
It seems to me that it’s probably not exactly a good use of time for these guys to be ogling nude pics while the terrorists are trying to kill us in our beds.
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“Is the only immigration bill we’re going to have one that hurts children?”
by digby
It’s pretty hard for me to believe that this wasn’t the obvious position from the get but better late than never:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — a key bloc on immigration issues — came together Wednesday to oppose the idea. The growing opposition among Democrats will make it more difficult for the GOP-led House and the Democratic-run Senate to reach an accord before Congress leaves Aug. 1 for its annual summer break.
Members of the Hispanic caucus personally conveyed their opposition to changing current deportation policy during a closed-door White House meeting with Obama on Wednesday.
“We had an emotional meeting, but emotional in the sense that we were connected,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) told reporters afterward. “We asked him to be our champion, we asked him to be a hero to our community, and he responded to us as a champion and as a hero, in my opinion.”
During the meeting Obama told the group that he wanted “to find a way to ensure due process but also speed things up” in the processing of young migrants, according to another lawmaker in the room who asked not to be identified in order to frankly describe the president’s opinions.
Pelosi told the New York Times in an interview Wednesday that using Obama’s request for more money to change how the federal government deals with young migrants would be “exactly the wrong way to go.” She added, “Is the only immigration bill we’re going to have one that hurts children?”
I suppose it was inevitable that so many leading Democrats’ first instinct was to shriek that the children had to be sent back to their parents — many of them have been conditioned over many years to react defensively whenever the right wing gets hysterical. I was depressed when Hillary Clinton, a person known for her entire career as an advocate for children , so harshly assessed the situation and demanded that these kids be sent back with dire warnings that they would not be allowed to stay. I don’t know if her position has changed now but at least we’re seeing a shift among the Democrats in congress and the president seems to be on board.
Frankly, I don’t even want to talk about the politics of this because it makes me sick to think that these kids are being used as pawns. But if Democrats don’t have a heart at least that ought to have a brain. The politics are on their side.
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The honest pol
by digby
I don’t know if this satirical ad is overt enough for most people to get what it’s saying, but it should be fun to see if it does.
(But why the puerile nickname? Are they trying to get 9 year olds on their team?)
The suspense is killing them too, a little bit at a time
by digby
Whenever I think about what it must be like to live under the death penalty this passage from literature always comes to mind:
Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls. In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention . It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that in lieu of a scythe he held what at a casual glance I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it (for its position was immediately over my own), I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterward the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and of course slow. I watched it for some minutes, somewhat in fear but more in wonder. Wearied at length with observing its dull movement, I turned my eyes upon the other objects in the cell.
A slight noise attracted my notice, and looking to the floor, I saw several enormous rats traversing it. They had issued from the well which lay just within view to my right. Even then while I gazed, they came up in troops hurriedly, with ravenous eyes, allured by the scent of the meat. From this it required much effort and attention to scare them away.
It might have been half-an-hour, perhaps even an hour (for I could take but imperfect note of time) before I again cast my eyes upward. What I then saw confounded and amazed me. The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the idea that it had perceptibly DESCENDED. I now observed, with what horror it is needless to say, that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a razor also it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole HISSED as it swung through the air.
That’s from Poe’s Pit and the Pendulum.
A federal judge declared California’s death penalty to be unconstitutional today:
The “dysfunctional administration of California’s death penalty system,” wrote Judge Cormac J. Carney of United States District Court, has led to “inordinate and unpredictable” delays in the execution of inmates.
“Allowing this system to continue to threaten Mr. Jones with the slight possibility of death, almost a generation after he was first sentenced, violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment,” he wrote.
It does, no doubt about it.
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Chart ‘o the day
by digby
But don’t worry guys. Everybody assures me that they’re on the run.
Update: Meanwhile, they are working a similar strategy elsewhere:
“What we’re saying is that of course you can support both religious freedom and access to contraception,” McConnell told the Hill. That’s a convenient narrative for a party that is eager to win back female support. But what kind of access are we really talking about?
At the end of the day, if McConnell’s potential legislation is any indicator, Republicans are simply willing to go on the record to affirm that they don’t support outlawing birth control altogether. That shouldn’t necessarily be incredibly reassuring to women. Successful efforts to limit access to women’s health care services don’t typically result from outright bans — for proof, look no further than the fight against abortion. It’s easier to slowly chip away at women’s ability to afford their health care, and the first step in that bigger strategy is to cut off their insurance coverage for it.
Chipping away …
Color blind haters
by digby
When haters have no substance whatsoever for debate, they always plummet to the accusations of racism, and it has become an embarrassment of the left. I laugh in their soulless, race-baiting faces.
I have always made my decisions in life as to who I associate or work with based on the content of one’s character, his or her work ethic, job skills and overall human decency, never the color of skin.
For the record, I have hired blacks, Hispanics and Asians throughout my long 50-plus year rock ‘n’ roll career, and not once did I give any considerations whatsoever to color of skin, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or anything other than the individual’s integrity, capabilities and humanity.
If you guess Ted Nugent, you’d be right. The guy who just recently called the president a “sub-human mongrel.”
Also too, this:
I think that typically when you see the, I don’t even remember the term they use, but the gangs of blacks lately that have been just been going down the downtown streets and breaking windows on cars. We played the Milwaukee state fair a couple years ago and these black mobs were just attacking white folks coming out of the fair. And over and over again I watch the news and here’s a rape and here’s a burglary and here’s a murder in Chicago. 29 shot. 29 blacks shot by 29 blacks. At some point you got to be afraid of black and white dogs if the Dalmatian’s doing the biting.
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